Friday Column: Jamestown and Blood Meridian

I was surprised to read recently that Matthew Sharpe's novel Jamestown was influenced by Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. At first glance, these are pretty different books:  Jamestown is a sometimes-cartoonish retelling of the Jamestown colony set in the indeterminate future. Its exuberant prose ranges wildly over different eras and forms of communication. Blood Meridian is a deadly serious telling of an actual band of Apache-hunters in mid-19th-century Mexico. Its steely prose feels biblical, and it's tightly controlled like Hemingway. Truly, I thought to myself, Blood Meridian influencing Jamestown is a fine example of the strange ways in which a book may enter a writer's brain and find itself mutated into something quite different.

But then I thought a little harder. Are these two really so different? For one thing, both are extremely violent, so violent that you can't help but think that the authors are trying to make a point against violence by incessantly sticking it in your face. Here's Jamestown narrating an Indian attack:

What we saw then . . . was a sort of second bellybutton an inch below the first, darker, more inward, more bottomless, oozing a thick, unthoroughly mixed red and brown goo. I don't know much about physiology but the goo didn't seem like something that ought to happen to anyone, least of all a nice young guy like Matt . . .

Our guys shot, hid, shouted, and ran, while Dick Buck made do with me as surgical assistant on the floor of the bus. It was nice and not-so-nice to see how shiny-clean and sharp his tools were. Buck cut a short red line in Matt's belly. The line grew into an ovoid hole. Matt howled and passed out. I tried not to let the stench make me retch.

And now, Blood Meridian narrating the same thing:

A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped from their mounts. Horses were rearing and plunging and the mongol hordes swung up along their flanks and turned and rode full upon the them with lances. . . .

The kid's horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him lay with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead.

It strikes me that these two quotes are approaching the same thing from different directions. Both have certain details that stick in my mind--the unthoroughly mixed goo, the horse's pneumatic sigh--details that, despite the wildly different tones found in each quote, nonetheless make this violence real for me.

Both also personalize these scenes by centering them around a character (both of whom turn out to be protagonists in each book) that remains an unsteady light in the general gloom. Both of these characters are even attendant to impromptu battlefield surgery, which in each case ends up conveying more a sense of hopelessness than optimism.

These are hardly the only scenes of violence of decrepitude in either book; rather, members of both bands of invaders (i.e. the whites) are continually subjected to various kinds of assaults that grind them down.

Notably, in each book the landscape--and the violence it can perpetrate on an individual--becomes a character in and of itself. In McCarthy we get in touch with the boundless isolation of the Mexican desert, the way heat and thirst can scrape the life right off of you. For long periods McCarthy has his characters simply wander, and as we wander with them the desert becomes something big and palpable for us

In Sharpe things are a little different; since the book is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, it doesn't happen in any place and anyone's ever seen since. Since Sharpe has created a post-apocalyptic landscape (instead of appropriating a real-world one), the reference points are often inventions of his. For instance:

Never have I seen a hare open its mouth as wide as did the red hare who now bit the small head off the brown thing, whose red blood stained the stiff, brown grass. The second brown thing fled along the stalks, but not in time to not get caught by hare two and sheared in half. That was when I turned away and opted not to hunt the hares.

And yet, that isn't to say that McCarthy's desert isn't McCarthy's:

They way narrowed through rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was hung with dead babies. . . . These small victims , seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their underjaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky. Bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being.

Jamestown is quote openly post-apocalyptic, but even though Blood Meridian takes place mostly in 1849, "apocalyptic" is a good word for it. McCarthy may have recently experimented with the post-apocalyptic, but it's hard not to see Blood Meridian as McCarthy's own embodiment of an apocalypse. For instance, pages 1-3 immediately place us on warning:

Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. . . .

Only now is the child divested of all that he had been. His origins are becoming remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to a man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.

So as I thought about these two books, I began to see the correspondences: Both are setting up terminal landscapes that lend themselves to graphic descriptions of violence, and both are using actual, historic encounters between whites and Indians to think about violence as a force in the human world. And, both have protagonists that the authors use as foils to probe at the violence and, perhaps, ask the reader whether the world need be quite as terrible as it appears in these books.

The big difference here is the prose. In McCarthy the prose's baroque tone couches the book as an epic. The two incarnations of Good and Evil are largely nameless, generally being known as "the kid" and "the judge." We never really get inside any of the characters; they just remain the places where certain forces reside, forces that are described in greater and greater detail, probed from new sides again and again as the book progresses.

If McCarthy's is an epic with clearly defined boundaries, Sharpe's book comes off as incredibly schizoid. Look back at the quote about the deadly hares, and see how Sharpe undercuts the horror of his carnivorous rabbits with that quip at the end. (Or, for that matter, just think about the oxymoronic idea of a deadly rabbit.) Throughout, comedy is always cutting at the violence, continually making you doubt how serious it is. Further, Sharpe's language is as far as possible from McCarthy's baroque biblicisms, coming at us like a spoken voice consisting of high and low mashed up into an indistinguishable mass. Moreover, in Jamestown the main characters become real people (and rather neurotic people at that), and, as one would hope from "real" characters, they're conflicted and none can be called wholly Good or Evil.

These different approaches define what each book ends up being. McCarthy's seems to be able to only do one thing--deliver pain unto you--and it accumulates into a super-dense ball of fury, something like an ultimate snuff film made by splicing together hundreds of them. In the end it's, as Harold Bloom calls it, the "authentic Apocalyptic American novel," the "ultimate Western." In other words, death and mayhem taken to the nth power. In the end, the book is really about creating a certain aesthetic experience--that of the unbound state of war that (if I may be so bold) McCarthy sees as defining the human world--than exploring any question.

With Jamestown's emphasis on appropriating language from places like blogs, email, and instant messaging, and with it's interest in sampling from various philosophies and artforms, I'd hesitate to say that it's not about aesthetic experiences as well. But, with that said, we're clearly in entirely different territory than McCarthy. Whereas violence suffuses every single word of Blood Meridian, in Jamestown it's one of perhaps three main concerns that interact and evolve together as the book proceeds.

Despite the differences, though, these books are clearly related, and, finally, one might draw a line from Blood Meridian to Jamestown--the former the book that finally killed the Western, the latter the book that went back to the myth that constitutes very beginning of westward expansion in North America and stuck it in an indeterminate point in the future. Perhaps The Road fits in here somewhere as well--occurring in McCarthy's own post-apocalyptic world, it takes the heart and soul of the Western that he finally bludgeoned to death and sticks them, very much like Sharpe, into an indeterminate point in the future.